Chapter 1 My Ex-Boyfriend’s Favorite Butter Chicken Curry #3
After thoroughly blowing my nose out into a tissue, I tried another mouthful. It still tasted strange.
Seriously? Are my taste buds having a meltdown?
My dad used to run an izakaya bar back home in Kagoshima. As a young child, I helped out, and often did the cooking at home, too. Naturally, I became pretty confident in the kitchen. Give me thirty seconds, and I will have sliced half a cabbage end to end into perfectly julienned strips.
But come to think of it…
When I was in my third year of elementary school, our izakaya went out of business. It was my dad who’d shown me the ropes. I’d lived my entire life believing everything he taught me about cooking.
What if Dad’s palate couldn’t be trusted in the first place?
What if…both my dad and I had driven the izakaya out of business with our poor palates and bad cooking?
Then, still under the guise of ignorance, I invented my own signature curry, and served it to Kyohei with so much confidence that he felt compelled to say that he enjoyed it even though it was horrible.
Kyohei’s words from last night mixed with the smell of the curry and clung to my skin.
“To be honest, I’ve known for a long time that I needed to have this conversation with you. But when I looked at your face, I could see how hard you were trying for me. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I’m sorry.”
When he’d said “delicious,” had he really meant it?
Was he really “having fun” when he told me so?
What about his “I love you”s?
As my thoughts spiraled, memories flooded over me, the what-ifs and maybes multiplying and sticking clammily to my body. I wished that I could escape to India. I wished that I could pass out again.
“I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation earlier. Are you going through a bad breakup?”
As I lifted my head, Iori settled down next to me. Crossing his long limbs, he sipped his coffee elegantly.
“Could you be any more direct?” Hozumi said scoldingly.
“Well, at a time like this, the best course of action is to let it all out to someone.”
“Let it all out?”
“After all, only three things can heal a broken heart: empathy, time, and revenge,” Iori said, holding up three fingers.
“Empathy, time, and revenge…”
“Uh-huh. They say ‘time is the greatest healer,’ which I guess isn’t untrue. In my experience, though, it takes at least six months to get over the person who dumped you.”
“Did you just say six months?!”
I have to live with this pain for six whole months?
My headache worsened immediately.
“The question is, how will you get through those six months? To be able to fight pain, you need the empathy of others. Once you start believing that there are other people who share the same emotions as you, that’s when you finally start to feel like maybe you can move forward. So, tell me your love story.”
Iori rested his cheeks in his hands and smiled softly.
“Your words are as beautiful as your face,” I said.
With Iori’s kindness, my heart began to feel a little soothed. I wondered what I’d be doing if I hadn’t found this café. I imagined myself holed up at home, alone and weeping.
“Well…I’m pretty sure once I start talking, I won’t stop. And I will very likely bawl my eyes out. Are you sure about this?”
Iori let out a chuckle. “Sure. Why not?”
Suddenly, a smell that reminded me of smearing ink came wafting over, and it began to drizzle quietly.
At least the sound of rain will mask some of my sniffling, I thought.
I normally hate the rain. But at that moment, I felt a little grateful that it was there.
“So you were together for four whole years, and then you got dumped at twenty-nine? Well, that explains the drinking.”
Iori was a great listener, and I had practically given him my entire life story.
He now knew that my full name was Momoko Yuuki, and that I was from Kagoshima.
I told him that I worked for a company that operates a restaurant chain, and how its culture was so toxic that employees were always leaving.
To make up for the worker shortage, I had to take over the manager role for multiple restaurants.
This made taking the weekends off almost impossible, but as it was Kyohei’s birthday yesterday, I’d played every card I had in my deck to get myself out of the shift for two days.
Because of the unexpected turn of events, my weekend was now wide open.
“I think the number of I-forgots is proportionate to how uninterested a person is,” I said as I choked down the curry.
I had started to get used to the flavor and had almost persuaded myself that it was growing on me.
“I forgot to call. I forgot our anniversary. I forgot Christmas. I forgot your birthday.”
“Birthday is a tough one.”
“Right? Gradually, the number of I-forgots increased, and his excuses got less and less convincing. Then, over time, he just stopped making excuses.”
And I got better and better at saying, “Well, there’s nothing you can do about that,” as if I really meant it.
“Birthdays, I can take. I can’t blame someone for forgetting my birthday if they were completely snowed under at work. Forgetting birthdays is forgivable—let’s just say so. But how…how on earth does someone forget New Year’s?” I struck the table with my fist.
Just a few months ago, as we drew closer to the end of the year, I tried to get ahold of Kyohei, but no matter how many times I contacted him, he didn’t reply.
I was worried sick that something had happened to him.
Then on New Year’s Day, he wrote back, “Sorry. I didn’t realize that it was New Year’s Eve.
” He had the nerve to use that as an excuse.
“How could anyone living in Japan possibly forget New Year’s?” I asked.
“True. You’d have to be living under a rock.” Iori gave a dry grin.
“Maybe he was working overnight on New Year’s Eve?” Hozumi suggested.
“But I saw that he had liked a post by a pizza place announcing a New Year’s deal. It wasn’t that he had forgotten New Year’s itself.”
This seemed to startle Hozumi, and he fell off his chair.
“Are you okay?” Iori asked.
“Other people can see your likes?”
“Of course they can,” I responded.
Hozumi’s glasses had slid down his face. Pushing them back up, he continued his questioning. “Is that because you are an especially clingy person, and therefore you know a special trick that gives you the power to check other people’s likes?”
“How rude! Anyone can see other people’s likes!”
I showed him how to check the likes and Hozumi’s face turned pale; he started to tremble and scrolled furiously on his phone, mumbling something to himself.
“Hozumi, are you—”
“Let’s just leave him be,” Iori cut in. “Please continue.”
Ignoring the awkwardness that now filled the air, I carried on.
“Anyway, stuff like that kept happening, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything about it. And then yesterday, on Kyohei’s birthday, we were finally able to get together after a month of not seeing each other.”
We had a dinner date at a fancy restaurant, and we both got a little tipsy. I was relieved, thinking that nothing had changed between us after all. I accidentally-on-purpose missed the last train, which then led us to spending the night in a hotel.
As I remembered, I felt a deep pain in my chest.
There was a huge bed in the hotel room. I went to wash first. I put on my emergency skincare and lingerie I had thrown into my bag “just in case.” I had also packed an atomizer containing my Chloé perfume, but I thought better of it. I didn’t want to come across as desperate.
After bathing, Kyohei sat down on the bed with his legs crossed, rubbing his hair dry with a towel. I threw my arms around him and kissed him gently.
The spark has not faded, I thought.
My heart was beating faster and faster.
Kyohei sighed quietly.
“But then he said to me, ‘Can it wait till tomorrow?’ ”
It was the moment my intuition told me everything I needed to know.
“Oh…” Iori covered his face with his slender hands. “That must have hurt. That must have really hurt.”
“To be honest, I kind of thought last night would be our chance to get back on track. I was hopeful that he had planned on doing it, too.”
“Sorry, what do you mean by ‘doing it’?”
“You know…”
It seemed that Hozumi wasn’t following. Iori began to whisper something into his ear. Furrowing his brow, Hozumi looked dead serious as he listened. Eventually, his cheeks turned pink.
“Oh, right,” he said bashfully, and pushed his glasses up with his finger.
“It wasn’t like I was sexually dissatisfied. That wasn’t the point.”
This isn’t about sex. It’s not about sex at all.
“I took it as a direct sign that he didn’t love me anymore.
We hadn’t seen each other for a whole month, yet he didn’t even try to touch me.
A healthy man in his twenties who hadn’t slept with his girlfriend for a whole month wanted to wait ‘until tomorrow.’ I lost all hope at that moment.
It felt like I was now officially worthless as a woman. ”
I wondered if I had overshared, given that we’d only just met, but they were such generous listeners that the words kept pouring out.
“I didn’t know what was going on in his mind—he didn’t say he wanted to break up or tell me if there was any part of me that needed to change.
I didn’t have the slightest clue as to how to make things better.
I couldn’t cope with the pain of being neglected without any answers.
I thought that if he told me straight what he wanted, it would end my suffering. ”
A teardrop fell into my spoon and formed a tiny puddle.
“I couldn’t take it any longer, so I said, ‘If you don’t love me anymore, maybe it’s better to end things.’ I told him I didn’t want to waste any more time on someone who wasn’t interested in me.”
It was an ultimatum. I had vowed never to declare the words that I had held back, even though they had been on the tip of my tongue for the last four years.
“Did you want him to say it wasn’t true?” Iori asked gently.